Manage caption settings

Captions are available on videos where the owner has added them and on some videos where YouTube automatically provides them. You can change the default settings for captions on your computer or mobile device.

You can change how your captions look, what language they're in and more.

Turn captions on or off

Turn captions on

Go to the video player.

Underneath the video player, click More .

Select Open transcript.

You can click on any line of caption text to skip to that part of the video.

Adjust default caption size & style

Note: These will be your default captions format settings until you change them again or click Reset to go back to the default captions format.

Caption shortcuts

You can use keyboard shortcuts to quickly adjust caption formatting while watching your video. Make sure that you click inside the video player before using keyboard shortcuts.

'+' makes the captions bigger

'-' makes the captions smaller

Select caption language

Choose different caption languages by clicking the captions icon on a video. If the language isn't listed, you can select the option for auto-translated captions, which are translated using Google Translate.

Click the settings icon at the bottom of the video screen.

Click Subtitles/CC.

Click Auto-translate.

Select a language.

View captions transcript

For videos with captions provided by the owner, you can view the full captions transcript and jump to specific parts of the video.

Underneath the video player, click More.

Select the transcript icon . As you watch the video, the transcript will scroll to always show you the current text.